Recently, our firm took over the digital marketing efforts for a small company.

Their previous digital marketing efforts were led by a large, multi-national corporation that formerly specialized in Yellow Page advertising.

As we went about our onboarding checklist, we ran into a snag.

The small business had never had direct access to their Google Analytics account.

They had used their previous firm’s “proprietary” dashboards to track progress.

Our calls to the previous agency went unanswered.

We asked our client to contact the agency. They did.

The agency told our client that they owned the Google Analytics account, and even though my client had paid their previous bill in full and fulfilled the term of their contract, their analytics account would not be released.

So we called Google.

After speaking with three different folks at Google, we were told that we could not have access to our client’s analytics because a different URL, not my client’s, was being tracked by the analytics code.

A little bit of digging uncovered that more than 68 domains were using this same UA code. All of these sites appear to have signed up for digital marketing services from my client’s former agency.

I’m assuming that this agency is using some sort of dashboarding tool that pulls in data from a Google Analytics setup where different views are created with a single UA tracking code.

This makes it simple for them to set up websites (they build almost all of their client’s sites) and do all of the configurations in Analytics after the fact.

This is how the agency scales to handle the thousands of small business accounts they manage without using costly skilled talent.

This also means there is no way any of these companies can retain their analytics data after they decide to leave their agency.